John 4:1-26
When we think of
the stories of Jesus, we think of some
different things, such as the setting, the characters, and the lesson that it
is designed to teach us. All of those are ways of teaching about Jesus and his
place in our human world, as well as his teachings about God’s kingdom, but
sometimes we overlook something small yet important.
We remember the general story, but we tend to
forget the details.
Writers are taught that details are what make a story
more believable and more effective. If a traditional story contains small
details, we are more likely to look at them as truthful and factual than if
those details were not present.
In the story of
the Samaritan woman at the well, the first detail that we notice is the
Pharisees hearing that there was a competition of sorts between Jesus and John as to which man baptized more people
and made more disciples. Jesus didn’t
baptize people, but his disciples did,
but to the Pharisees, it didn’t matter. Jesus and John were both troublemakers
in their eyes.
Jesus then left
Judea and started back to his base in Galilee, but to get there, he had to go
through Samaria which was not exactly a friendly place for Jews. The Jews and
the Samaritans had been at odds for generations, one of the main points being
that the Jews worshiped at the temple in Jerusalem while the Samaritans held
that Mount Gerizim was the sacred
mountain where worship took place. Be that as it may, Jesus sent off his
disciples to buy food as he sat down by a
well, much as his remote ancestor Jacob had come to a well and met Rachel. We
even notice that noon is the time of the encounter, roughly the same time that
Jacob’s meeting with Rachel had taken place, a time when most women were not at
the well.
Jesus told the
Samaritan woman to bring her husband, and
she responded that she had no husband.
Jesus then informed her that he knew that she had had five husbands and the man
with whom she was living at present was
not her husband. History has branded her as an adulteress,
but was she? Divorce among Jews was a male prerogative, and the same could be said among the Samaritan population. A man
could divorce for many reasons, but the only one that was singled out was
adultery, hence the idea that the Samaritan woman was an adulteress.
But what if those
five husbands had died? If we think of the story of Onan (Genesis 38), who was
supposed to take his sister-in-law as a wife after each of his brothers had
married her in turn and then died without
having a child. Onan was not willing to be the latest of a procession of dead
husbands, and so he disobeyed custom and ended up paying a rather severe price.
Levirate marriages, where the wife bears
a child for her dead husband through the sperm of his brothers, was a way of
continuing and maintaining a direct bloodline.
The well at which
Jesus and the woman met was one dug by Jacob and given to his son Joseph.
That’s a detail that anchors the story in
a historical context. Jesus then asked for water, and the woman remarked that he had no bucket. Then Jesus tells her
that had she asked him for water he would have given her living water, water
which would quench her thirst forever. What did
that mean? What was living water? Why was it different than regular
water? And how could she, and in turn, us, obtain it?
As Jesus told her
about the living water, she came to
understand that he was a prophet and remarked that Samaritans had worshipped on
this mountain for generations. Jesus then told
her that the time was coming when it
didn’t matter whether they worshiped, in
Jerusalem or on Mount Gerizim, but that
God would be worshiped throughout the
land and all of its sacred places.
The world has many
sacred places: Stonehenge, Iona, Mecca,
the Ganges River, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and many other places around the world where people gather to worship and to touch
the spirituality of the site. The important thing is that God is greater
than any thing or any place, and can be worshiped either by our physical presence in a
church or in spirit, which can take place anywhere. That’s a detail that we sometimes forget. We attend
church on Sunday, and that’s the last contact with God that we have until the
next Sunday.
Perhaps we need to
remind ourselves that the details are important.
To live the Christian way is to surrender oneself to God throughout every hour
of every day and to follow the teachings of Jesus even when they seem to be impossible
to follow. Perhaps we need the faith of the Samaritan woman, running back to
her people to proclaim that she had seen the Messiah because he knew the details
of her life and more.
I need to consider
the details of my daily life. Did I make sure that I incorporated Jesus in
those details? It’s something to work on.
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